I was at a seminar today where I picked up a gimmick ball point pen from from Digikey which coincidentally had a pull out spring loaded scroll (about 9" x 2") with the resistor colour codes printed on it.

I've been doing some optical fibre splicing the past few days. THOSE machines are clever. They align the fibres, tell you if there's any dirt on them or if they are chipped or cut at the wrong angle, then they fuse them and tell you what the splice loss is. All while showing you what they're doing on a little LCD screen. Awesome application of technology.

BTW you're messing with my mind posting in my evening like this. I'm used to you posting in my morning. but I'm glad it's you in the different time zone, not me :-)

@Antedeluvian, Betajet....I have exactly that problem sometimes - sorting a bunch of resistors I have stripped off boards (yeah, I'm a sad case) and I use a DMM with one of thse tweezer probes you use for SMD components - on small resistors they work fine AND you can just drop them into the right compartment in the box I use for storing them. Works pretty quick.

But it would be very cool to look at it and say "brown black black red brown" and the computer would say "10K 1%" back to you...

The trouble with 1% resistors is that you have to look twice to make sure you have the bands the right way round. It's not as obvious as with 5%ers. And the above example would be a perfectly legal value the wrong way round - - 120Ω 1%...